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Left to right: Natalia and her coworker Lisa aided victims Snejana and Irina.
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Women stolen and sold
Twenty-one-year-old Irina Derebchinskaya was deceived by a college girlfriend. Three years ago, the so-called friend offered to help unemployed Irina get work as a cleaning lady in Turkey. The friend paid for Irina's flight, accompanied her to Istanbul and brought her to a hotel where a man, claiming to be the friend's boyfriend, took Irina's passport and told her she would work as a prostitute. She was put in a room with four other girls where she was forced to have sex with as many as four men a day. "My pimp decided the hours I worked. It could be during daylight, or they would wake me up at night. The clients offered me more money not to use a condom, but I stayed safe," says Irina. "I was so afraid. I wanted to go home. They said I had no rights and I had to earn back the money they paid for my flight if I wanted to leave."
Women account for 75 per cent of those who are unemployed in Ukraine and, like Irina, many thousands fall prey to bogus offers to work abroad as waitresses, models, nannies and maids. The jobs are advertised in newspapers, offered through job agencies or suggested by friends and relatives who themselves have been tricked or coerced into participating in the scams. Especially in poor rural communities, criminals offer large sums to people for betraying their sisters, nieces, cousins, daughters or girlfriends.
Other women voluntarily opt to work in the sex trade, hoping for fair pay, but are not aware of the debt-bondage often imposed by ruthless pimps, or that they will be denied the right to choose clients or safe sex methods.
Virtually every town and city in Ukraine has lost women and girls to sex trafficking, and, sadly, the stories are all too similar. When 18-year-old Snejana was offered a job as a waitress in Moscow in 2005, she jumped at the chance. After all, the person offering her the work was a girlfriend from her village on the outskirts of Odessa. So Snejana and her sister boarded a train for Moscow, paid for by the friend. When they arrived at the friend's flat, there was a man there who confiscated their passports and took them to a street near the railway station. As Snejana recounts the indignities she endured, she bows her head, staring at the floor: "There were 50 girls there, all from Ukraine. They priced us according to our looks. The pretty girls were more expensive -- $150. I was in the $100 group."
From 12 to 6 a.m., Snejana and her sister were forced to walk the street along with the others and have sex with Russian men under the ever-watchful eye of pimps, sitting in cars across the road.
According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), which has received funding from CIDA, sexual slavery is the fastest growing crime internationally. IOM's education campaigns aim to prevent people from falling prey to traffickers; they also provide legal aid, counselling and medical care for victims and help them restart life in their home communities.
Not everyone is enticed with a job offer: Wendy Lu McGill, IOM's public information officer, recounts a case in which "young Ukrainian girls between 11 and 18 from rural areas were being kidnapped to Moscow and sold for their virginity. It was a huge criminal ring and the clientele were Russian men."
Photographs by Heather Buchan. Produced with the support of the Government of Canada through the Canadian International Development Agency.
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